Doukakis's Apprentice

But the phone remained ominously silent.

What would it take, he wondered, to flush Peter Prince out of his love nest? Clearly more than an injured daughter.

What sort of man saw that his daughter was in hospital and still didn’t call her?

Contemplating that question, Damon drained the whisky. Responsibility towards family flowed through him, as much a part of his being as the blood that was his life force. He could no more abdicate that responsibility than he could stop breathing.

From the moment the police had broken the news about his parents he’d buried his own feelings and focused all his energies on providing for his sister.

Clearly Peter Prince felt no such sense of obligation.

Damon thought back to that day a decade earlier when he’d received the call from the school. He’d walked out of an important meeting to go to his sister and, yes, he’d given her a hard time. Children, especially teenagers, needed rules and discipline. But his abiding memory of that day wasn’t anything to do with Arianna. It was of Polly Prince, standing in one corner of the office, alone and defiant as he’d torn strips off her. Alone. There had been no sign of her father. At the time, Damon had taken that evidence of lax parenting to be the reason his daughter had slid so far off the rails.

Now he was wondering whether ‘lax’ should be replaced with ‘absent’.

Just what part had the man played in Polly’s life?

His phone buzzed. As he answered the call Damon glanced towards the guest room but the door remained firmly closed and he wondered uneasily if he should have checked on her again. The doctor had told him she needed someone around.

Trying to block out an unsettling image of Polly stretched unconscious on the floor of the guest bathroom, he spoke to his pilot an then terminated the call and considered his options.

Of course she wasn’t unconscious.

The girl was tougher than Kevlar.

But the image stayed with him as he gave a soft curse and strode through the apartment towards the guest suite. One look, he promised himself. As long as she was breathing, he’d leave her alone.

Pushing open the door, he saw her curled up in a ball on top of the bed, a notebook face down on the white silk cover, ink from a discarded pen spreading black blotches across the delicate fabric.

But it wasn’t the ink that caught his attention. It was the exceptional pallor of her face. Remembering the doctor’s comment that she should have stayed in hospital, he crossed the room swiftly, his overriding emotion one of concern. Was the wound bleeding again? He gently pushed her hair away from her face and the soft strands flowed over his hand like liquid gold, the scent of it distracting him from his purpose.

Reminding himself that he was supposed to be checking her head, he stroked her hair back and studied her face.

There were dark violet shadows under her eyes and the livid bruise on her forehead was an angry smudge. Asleep, she looked younger than ever.

How did she feel, he wondered, knowing that her father didn’t care enough to call?

Staring down at her, he remembered the words she’d thrown at him in the boardroom.

‘If there’s an emergency, I’m expected to handle it.’

To her credit, she’d been trying to handle it all day. Whatever he might think of the way he used office space, there was no denying that she’d worked hard to help settle the staff into their new surroundings and she’d defended them with a passion that had surprised him.

Wondering how anyone so small could be so monumentally aggravating, Damon gently removed the offending pen from her limp fingers and put it on the table next to the bed.

As he leaned forward and pulled the duvet over her, the pink notebook tumbled onto the floor.

Damon retrieved it, smoothed the crumpled pages, and was about to close it when something caught his eye.

Run, breathe, live…

She’d scribbled the words over the pages of her notebook in scrawling, loopy handwriting but what caught his attention were the other combinations.

Run, live

Run right

Live to run